International Guidelines for Environmental Education and the Connections with the Contexts of Origin

The Original Period

Intense protests about serious environmental problems and the regular conflicts that occurred during the Cold War contributed to the strengthening of an ecological eschatology, rooted in the growing chances of an apocalypse and founded on the spread of ecological awareness in the modern world (Duarte, 2013). In this regard, environmental movements, the creation of international regulatory mechanisms and cultural expressions focused on overcoming human–nature problems were remarkable and constituted the specific driver for the formation of a collective conditioned to GTS’s ideas.

After the Second World War, the process of developing international EE guidelines was guided by the ideals of nature protection as a key propositional measure. In this context, the governments that signed the Convention on Nature Protection and Wildlife Preservation in the Western Hemisphere were straightforwardly instructed to create national parks and reserves. It is worth noting that the composition of influences is the first arena of action for public policies and, in such circumstances, the establishment and engagement of key political concepts would grant social credit and provide a vocabulary for policy-making (Bowe et al., 1992).

Contrary to the vernacular of protectionism, Orduna (2008) describes other interests that led to the creation of national parks and reserves, especially in poor countries. The author explains that, after the Second World War, there was an expansion of institutions for research, protection, and conservation of nature towards the periphery countries. As one of the greatest expressions of this process, the creation of the World Wide Fund for Nature represented an old concern of the core capitalist countries with controlling the resources of the dependent capitalist countries. Based on this articulation, an effort was made at instilling an ecological culture that would demonstrate the environmental damage resulting from the development of local populations, seeking to prevent resources from being used, contaminated, or wasted.

Education was initially understood as a tool capable of inducing conservation and preservation actions in a managed fashion through individual and collective behaviour change (UN, 1953). The naturalist positions that marked the Convention on Nature Protection contributed to the weaving of elements that biased the shaping of the idea of an environment-oriented education and founded the process of development of the first active conceptual elements on the interactions that formed the GTS: accountability of the individual and use of EE as a tool for behaviour change. This idea permeated foundations that were present as propositional principles in all subsequent periods of international EE guidelines, consisting of a specific thought style.

Intense events involving science, education, and nature in the 1940s initiated the communication between members from different countries in favour of creating a global structure for managing environmental issues. According to Fleck (1981), the collective cannot be characterized by the sum of individual efforts; instead, it arises from the possibilities of specific formations that develop over generations through the intracollective and intercollective circulation of ideas. This movement was consolidated with the first events of the International Union for Protection of Nature (UNESCO, 1948b), which provided a different perspective from previous discussions, as political and scientific figures concentrated their efforts in planning actions for the preservation and conservation of nature, with the Cartesian sense still prevailing. Importantly, UNESCO understood natural sciences resolutions as those that ‘relate to man’s knowledge and control of nature’ (UNESCO, 1948a, p. 9).

Despite the key role historically granted to the protection of nature, the philosophy that guided IUPN’s work saw in men the heart of the natural system and considered that ideas of conservation directly served their interests and needs, given that the exploitation of nature was the basis of human civilization (Mccormick, 1991). The representatives participating in IUPN’s creation described that temporal context as a time when human living standards were impaired because natural resources were becoming inadequate. Thus, the convention sought to highlight people’s dependence on exhaustible resources and the need to reverse nature’s destruction processes to ensure peace, progress and prosperity. This condition would only be achieved if people (in addition to being awakened to the reality of dependence) ‘recognize the need for their protection and restoration as well as for their wise and informed administration’ (UNESCO, 1948b, p. 16).

IUPN’s initial objective was to distribute documents, legal texts, scientific studies and other information on the union’s decisions to governments and organizations. Since its inception, international environmental planning was structured around stylistic principles to be transmitted via global guidelines using discursive devices. As Fleck (1981) argues, intracollective circulations occur amid agreements, dis- agreements and mutual concessions until the process of collectivizing their results is completed. Within the context of environmental regulation, there was a dynamic for the establishment of a consensus that would define a global environmental programme guided by stylistic principles imbued with political, social and economic influences of that time.

The guiding thread of the discussions in the late 1960s was strongly linked to the propositions about the importance and potential of science in understanding and solving environmental problems. The possibility of applying the attributes of modern science and technology to the mechanisms of environmental dynamic control pervaded all the investigative needs mentioned in the Biosphere Conference. This, in turn, assisted and encouraged the birth of an international scientific reform in which research methods and objectives were restructured to provide additional environmental quality to modern processes and products.

Our analysis revealed that the predominant thought in the original period expressed a linear configuration of the productive chain focusing on the relationships between population growth, human needs, resource use and triggering of ecological problems. ³ Thus, the human being represented the beginning and the end of the process, at times as a problem driver, other times as a problem solver. The concept of individual responsibility was constantly reiterated at the end of the original period, and proposals emerged from it whose content encouraged the search for solutions based on science and technology dominated by the individuals (although not all of them, which reinforced the need for technical cooperation between developed and underdeveloped countries).

The structural and subjective causes of the environmental crisis and the civilizing standard, characterized by a spoliatory nature with a capitalist basis, were not given due attention because the spotlight was on human behaviour through the personification of global effects, such as the increased ‘needs’ caused, in turn, by the production system and market policies. In short, the environmental conferences of the original period developed and disseminated ideas regarding protectionist internationalization, advocacy of a technical and scientific framework, and recommendations for rationalizing resources and raising people’s awareness. Originally, the GTS’s ideas reproduced a notion of neutrality in educational processes, as they indicated the prevalence of a naturalistic conception of socio-environmental relations and the hegemonic materialization of subjectivities intertwined with the Western development model that conceives socio-environmental problems as a natural consequence of the civilizing process.

The Conceptual Period

To explain how ideas are linked to a common thought style, Fleck (1981) says that a thought style derives from tradition and habit and produces a willingness to feel and act in an oriented and restricted manner, preventing free thought from unfolding. International EE guidelines in the original period were outlined as a set of systematic ideas proposed by experts, which culminated in the establishment of strengthened relations at the beginning of the conceptual period.

The arrangement of the directive developments of the Stockholm Conference (UN, 1973) is considered an emerging political fact/event in a context marked by profound changes in human relations, intensified mainly by the production of risks in the course of the historical development of modernity. These risks, according to Beck (1992), reverberate through a process of socialization of damages to nature as they become social, economic and political threats to the industrialized society worldwide.

The Stockholm Conference (UN, 1973) in the conceptual period produced a set of international guidelines with a great impact on the discursive history of EE. The International Environmental Education Programme (IEEP), conceived at Stockholm and then implemented at Belgrade (1975), was the carrier and disseminator of the GTS, reinforcing and expanding EE guidelines worldwide. In addition to forming the basis of the global plan for EE, the conceptual structures built at Stockholm, Belgrade and Tbilisi consolidated the GTS, whose theoretical framework was based on the following propositions: internationalization, cooperation, rationalization of resources, global responsibility and education as a tool to raise awareness.

At the Stockholm Conference, the human right to the environment and well-being was defined as the basis for advocating a developmental movement. There was, therefore, a consensus that ‘[environmental deficiencies] can best be remedied by accelerated development through the transfer of substantial quantities of financial and technological assistance’ to developing countries (UN, 1973, p. 4).

Paradoxically, the conference participants also acknowledged in the report that ‘in the industrialized countries, environmental problems are generally related to industrialization and technological development’ (UN, 1973, p. 3). Despite the coexistence of the two dimensions during the meeting provided by the intracollective and intercollective circulation of divergent ideas on the major causes of environmental problems, the global thought collective (GTC) concluded that the solution to social and environmental conflicts was not to be guided by ‘zero growth’ proposals, which were widely disseminated after the report of the Club of Rome, ⁴ but instead by strategies to right-size the flow of raw material extraction and production using financial aid. This would help developing countries ‘speed up, without adverse environment effects, the exploration, exploitation, processing and marketing of their natural resources’ (UN, 1973, p. 58).

Articulated with the GTS’s pillars, education, as the artifice of pro-nature actions marked by the primacy of regulatory elements linked to the preservation, conservation and rationalization of natural resources, followed its discursive course without losing the instrumental emphasis on the materialization of ideals created by the experts amid an effective tension between standardization and appreciation of diversities.

During that period, economic and social forces transformed the dynamic of international relations by means of cultural changes, new divisions of labour, post-war demographic expansion, and decolonization processes that were also profoundly affecting political relations worldwide (Hobsbawm, 1995). To reduce the effects of the economic instability caused by successive crises, ⁵ the core countries advanced in the creation of new mechanisms to coordinate and control. The new condition was associated with structural changes caused by the expansion of international and transnational activities (Furtado, 1976).

As a reflex, the environmental issue was then associated with the social problems in the world in an incisive and forceful manner, while it was also in line with the mechanisms that at times promoted a balanced development based on equity and common interest and other times promoted an ‘accelerated development of all the developing countries’ through the system of cooperation with developed countries that supported the global economic readjustment project in the 1970s (UN, 1974, p. 4).

At the Belgrade Meeting, new latent concepts were identified in expressions such as social justice and equity. The intersection of ideas from the search for solutions that reduced social inequality with the new model of world development produced a mixture of hegemonic ideals and counter-hegemonic claims, formed by hybridizations of social and particular needs, political and ideological propositions, and economic aspirations. This combination of contemporary but often contradictory foundations can be explained by the expanded diversity of countries attending international conferences, which produced increasingly heterogeneous documents after 1970.

The creation of a New International Economic Order (NIEO) was proposed in 1974 and sought to establish, at that time, a consensus that there was ‘a close interrelationship between the prosperity of the developed countries and the growth and development of the developing countries’ (UN, 1974, p. 3). The new economic programme also provided that the agreement would require that developing countries used ‘all their resources for the cause of development’ with the purpose of promoting a sustainable growth of the world economy and accelerating their development (UN, 1974, p. 4). In the organization of the so-called new order, the UN intended to take measures for the ‘recovery, exploitation, development, marketing and distribution of natural resources, particularly of developing countries […] with a view to bringing about the accelerated development of developing countries’ (UN, 1974, p. 5).

The structural crisis of the capitalist economy had two main dimensions: a reduction in productive labour, which led to high unemployment rates, and a constant decrease in the rates of surplus value, which was a consequence of the former due to the growing need to increase the technical composition of labour forces. Because there was great competitiveness in the search for extraordinary profit, capitalism restricted employment opportunities and generalized the overexploitation of labour in the world economy, which led to the establishment of the material bases for globalization (Martins, 2011).

In the atmosphere of the conceptual period, economic readjustments, conserv- ationist ideals and a belief in the scientific and technological development led to the strengthening of the cooperation system and the establishment of guidelines for the NIEO, in addition to the creation of a model of education based on world awareness. Thus, EE emerges as an instrument of the movement of political, economic and (in)formative globalization, focusing on the awareness-raising nature of education. Designed at the Belgrade Workshop (UNESCO, 1977a), the political and economic elements that built this discourse pervaded the rationale in favour of a global education that would serve as a strategy for providing basic instruction and strengthening the new world economic bases, with the purpose of fostering the development of poor countries: ‘the reform of educational processes and systems is central to the building of this new development ethic and world economic order’ ⁶ (UNESCO, 1977a, p. 14).

Initiating at the beginning of the conceptual period and prolonging for the following decade, the long economic crisis in industrialized countries led to macroeconomic, financial and productive imbalances across the international economy. The consequent growth in rivalry between large corporations, the solidarity of economic spaces and the homogenization of production and consumption patterns characterized a historical context of the advance of capitalism as one of the consequences and ways of fighting the crisis, which even led to national states losing their autonomy and seeing their economic policies become less effective (Soares, 2009).

Because of globalization, capitalism structured a new international division of labour that integrated the management of companies globally and established other forms of relationship between core, semi-periphery and periphery. The core countries became dedicated to the production of pieces and components with high added value and to research and development of technological innovations, while the dependent countries entered the world economy and increasingly targeted their production to the international market using overexploitation of labour. Thus, the change in profit distribution in favour of the monopolies constituted a factor to compensate for the capital crisis (Martins, 2011).

The IEEP took charge of structuring, conceptualizing and developing the bases for national EE policies, which were closely intertwined with rightsizing in the economic field, especially in undeveloped countries. The opening of the programme, which was directed by William Stapp, a professor at the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment, the United States, stressed the specific role of EE in the international political scene. The main measures mentioned at the Belgrade Meeting and adopted as objectives of the programme were the use of mass media and the provision of funds for the worldwide dissemination of EE. In light of these objectives, training expectations on a local and global scale were closely related to human behaviour and involved developing new attitudes, changing values, accepting global responsibility and having the ability to search for appropriate solutions.

Underlying the definition of EE’s objectives, an articulated mechanism of strategies for the creation of guidelines that incorporated elements arising from connections between the educational processes and the market economy was structured in the conceptual period. The international cooperation systems fit the mould of the so-called neoliberal adjustment, which appeared as a counterpoint to the global crisis of the model of accumulation and gained ground in the 1970s. This provided a new classification category in which the poor become the target of assistance policies in the logic of market liberalization, thus creating a new social model of accumulation (Soares, 2009).

These relationships established by the GTC resulted in an ideological apparatus that guided and justified the formulation of EE guidelines in Latin America. Even though the ecological dimension was included in the agenda of development actions, the ecologically biased proposals maintained productivity and economic growth as the main purpose given that they were a sine qua non for achieving social well-being, as observed at the Stockholm and Belgrade Conferences and their regional developments (UN, 1973; UNESCO, 1977a, 1977b). Thus, the GTC established, e.g., that ‘the role of EE consisted of serving as an instrument to raise awareness for the phenomenon of underdevelopment and its environmental implications’ (UNESCO, 1977b, p. 13, our translation). Briefly, the first EE initiatives in the international system invested in partial analyses of the overall picture of global relations, highlighting the deficiencies of underdeveloped countries and offering unilateral propositions, assigning global responsibility in a vertical and asymmetric fashion.

With concepts rooted in this structural matrix, EE’s objectives designed purposes within the scope of educational policies and produced formative expectations such as awareness raising, knowledge sharing, development of attitudes, skills and ability to assess, and development of a sense of responsibility for participation. At Tbilisi, this set of functions gained strength as the GTC emphasized and assigned a new functional quality to EE, linked to its potential to enable the public to understand the existence and importance of interdependence between states, reduce international tensions, develop a system of mutual understanding and favour the development of friendly relations among states (UNESCO, 1978).

In the conceptual period, the GTS developed a model of thinking based on the idea that the ecological crisis is directly linked to socioeconomic factors that determine the level of development and progress of a society. However, our analysis showed that the statements about the importance of social and cultural aspects in the assessment of the environmental issue are generic statements, with no mention to the degree of involvement of the production method and the market as a driving force for triggering the environmental problems. Despite these complex systemic relations that constitute the environment, EE was announced at the Tbilisi conference as an instrument that generates individual and summative actions, whose responsibility is in the hands of the general population.

By oversizing the pragmatic nature of human actions and their potential to solve environmental problems—which are, in fact, as shown by Leff (2010), the materialization of social disorders arising from a rational model based on expropriation—the dissemination of the objective of encouraging and promoting means of participation, advocated at both Belgrade and Tbilisi, does not seem to have provided the word with a political meaning. Active interest and skills that provide people around the world with conditions to dedicate ‘to work individually and collectively toward a solution of current problems and prevention of new ones’ (UNESCO, 1978, p. 40) lose effect in the context of strengthened capitalist relations.

The Developmental Period

Despite the need to acknowledge changes that occur in circulations of ideas from one context to another, the conditioning process of EE practices in a global setting, based on the international sense of solidarity, can be seen in publications from this period, which highlight the legitimation of GTS through continuous directions between GTC’s esoteric circle and the exoteric circles consisting of researchers, educators and managers articulated with the propositions of the IEEP. Fleck says that a thought collective features a universal structural characteristic: every thought creation entails the formation of a small esoteric circle and a larger exoteric circle, consisting of the members of a collective (Fleck, 1981, 2008) in a relationship between the elite and the masses. The dynamic of thought circulations between international EE guidelines and the local EE practices can be explained by the overlap of many circles forming the GTC.

Socially conditioned by the principles of cooperation, solidarity and acknowledgement of interdependence, the GTC had features that did not allow relationships with dominant intentions, i.e., intentions that sought to distance the elite from the masses. In this regard, the democratic form favoured the consolidation of principles linked to the GTS by establishing the expansion of diversity as a hallmark of the IEEP. Concerning the democratic trait identified in the relationship between these circles, we agree with Fleck when he states that, in this type of interaction, the ‘elite panders, as it were, to public opinion and strives to preserve the confidence of the masses’ (Fleck, 1981, p. 105).

During the developmental period, the emergence of a collective mental willingness provided knowledge with an increasingly strong sense of style. These relationships were seen in the passive incorporation of stylistic principles and the identification of its core ideas in courses offered in many countries around the world in a close relationship with the IEEP. The planning and two-decades-long duration of the programme contributed to the consolidation of a style and to the support of a known esoteric circle, especially in public policies, to this day.

The causal principle associated with underdevelopment and associated elements was the main argument put forth by environmental discourse during the developmental period, which echoed in the election of propositions expressing associations between so-called unsuitable human behaviours (such as poverty, poor development), solutions planned through changes to these structures and education as a methodological tool for human shaping/improvement (UNESCO, 1987a).

From this perspective, focusing on poor economic development, poverty and demographic growth as GTS’s causal principles strengthened propositions in favour of rapid economic development. The resistance of these principles to contradictions, their consequent persistence across periods, and the establishment of active and passive connections in view of endorsed foundations led to the formation of an organized and independent opinion system based on a discourse linked to the restructuring project of the production system as the background for EE’s objectives and goals defined by the GTS.

The GTS’s stylistic principles, marked by the instrumentalization of education, conditioned views in different contexts throughout the history of international EE guidelines, which limited EE’s objectives and oriented them towards the achievement of goals produced by an array of knowledge rooted in a market dynamic. By expanding awareness priorities into an emphasis on problem-solving, international EE guidelines defined that curricular organization, ‘insufficient preparation of educators’ and the abstract character of education, ‘generally nonproblem-solving’, prevented EE from being implemented (UNESCO, 1982, p. 2). The identified barriers represented the lack of elements that the GTC a priori deemed important in many countries.

This concern was directly tied to the belief in the expansion of professional development as an important factor in the improvement of conditions for solving environmental issues, which is linked to the emphasis on individual aspects and defines the paradox of conscious subjects in a society dominated by a hegemonic system based on the search for excessive profit. This concentration of educational strategies addressing the need to develop individual values provided the GTS with an active connection driven by socio-environmental demands of the time and supported by the pillars of moral/civic education in values education approaches. ⁷

In the GTS’s developmental period, the individual’s key role was bi-dimensional: on the one side, a universalist perspective highlighting the poor use of natural resources and the systems created by humans, and on the other side, a more individualistic perspective emphasizing inappropriate values, attitudes and behaviours, as well as overconsumption. The dilemma of individual accountability is in its inability to overcome the reductionist view that attributes nature’s destructive power to an abstract individual, thus ignoring a myriad of conditions and factors inherent to environmental reality. Homogenizing individuals produces wrong understandings about the different social positions they assume and the opportunities they have to make decisions that affect their daily lives.

For the GTC, poor intellectual development in the industrial and agricultural sectors (workers, farmers and traders) has ‘implications for environmental policies, because their efficiency of the latter seems to depend upon increased awareness on the part to those who, through decisions they take every day on economic and human environment’ (UNESCO, 1983, p. 9). This logic reflects a rationality that disregards social, political and economic inequalities to which individuals are subjected, as it assigns the awareness of workers, farmers and traders to the power of achieving effective environmental policies through their supposed influence on decision-making. Beyond the supposed role of the working class in decisions related to the production industry, EE’s primary function that of raising awareness, inhibits the emergence of popular counter-movements without the required political component.

It is worth noting that propositions contrasting with hegemonic interests were constantly seen at UNESCO, aiming to underscore inequalities in this context. Senegalese author Amadou-Mahtar M’bow was director-general at UNESCO and was constantly claiming the right to diversity and respect for culture in the fight against the passive adoption of foreign models. Additionally, M’bow (1976) argued that each society should plan its own educational actions, as there is nothing more dangerous than supporting ‘arguments that reinforce the power to maintain what can be called the world’s economic hegemony’ (M’bow, 1976, pp. 571–573, our translation).

Despite the suspicions and divergences regarding the objectives of the new order in the context of educational planning, this propositional principle remained guiding the efforts in multilateral organizations in the early 1980s. It sought to highlight education as an integrating factor of development both in the proposals that demanded endogenous development and in the more liberal ones, which indicated that an integrated development policy should be created and that education was intended to contribute to the achievement of socioeconomic objectives (Debeauvais ⁸ , 1982, p. 151).

Together with the intensification of social inequalities, even in developed market economies, and the widening gap between the aspirations of poor countries and the predisposition of rich countries to accept them, ⁹ ideological disputes between free-market advocates and Keynesians escalated in the 1980s. The predominance of free market ‘theology’ in the war of ideologies sought to transfer employment to methods of maximizing profits. Consequently, in the new transnational economy, domestic wages were increasingly exposed to competition and governments began to lose the ability to protect them (Hobsbawm, 1995).

The increased foreign debt in dependent countries expanded the power of international financial organizations through the imposition of structural adjustment policies and the payment of debt in dollars. The materialization of environmental damages resulted from productive practices that sought to ensure greater profitability in the face of high interest rates. The victory of neoliberal policies was observed in the gigantic boost in the dominant countries’ dependence on natural resource imports to sustain the ‘quality of life’ of the population. From 1960 to 1990, the volume of oil imports increased from almost 400 million tons to more than 1 billion tons; coal imports increased from less than 100 million tons to almost 400 million tons; and iron imports increased from approximately 100 million tons to almost 400 million tons. Thus, the new configuration of power with the advance of neoliberal globalization, more intensely from the 1980s onwards, mitigated the dependence on raw materials in industrialized countries. Accepting International Monetary Fund supervision and plans enabled a feedback of the system (Porto-Gonçalves, 2017).

With the strengthening of neoliberal measures in favour of the core and after the introduction of the new notion of sustainable development, intense efforts aimed at the NIEO and recurrent prerogatives in the international EE guidelines decreased in the second half of the 1980s, although the elements of international cooperation and resource solidarity have persisted throughout the discursive history of the GTS.

The idea of poverty as a generator of socio-environmental problems prevailed in the discursive history of the international EE guidelines in their different contexts of origin and during the GTS’s spread, and this discursive trait gradually raised the acclaim for a ‘new’ development model. Thus, the notion of a global model was clearly gaining ground in discussions, in a conceptual framework that advocated fighting low economic growth and poverty as the basic principles for proposals.

The geopolitical dispute between northern and southern countries constituted the ideological setting for the performance and junction of at least two lines of thought during the development of the GTS: the propositions for free expansion of the market as a multilateral mechanism to achieve development; and those that suggested the adoption of a new model, different from that operated by the prevailing economy. However, the developmental period saw a gradual erasure of the latter as new concepts were introduced into the dynamic of environmental guidelines.

The introduction of the notion of sustainable development ¹⁰ as a conceptual device of neoliberalism established EE as a tool to induce a new model of environmental management that could accelerate economic development in the southern countries as a measure to fight poverty. The response to the clashes hitherto occurred appeared in the strengthening of a new moral economy. According to Ball (1997), the philosophy of neoliberalism supported the criticism of state planning and provision and the advocacy of market mechanisms in the various social sectors.

The capitalist economy assumed a prominent position and rationalized the ideological debate between Keynesians and neoliberals in England and the United States. While Keynesians argued that high wages, employment and the welfare state created consumer demands, thereby fuelling economic expansion, neoliberals believed that the free market provided conditions to produce greater growth in the ‘wealth of nations’ and to sustainably distribute wealth and income (Hobsbawm, 1995, p. 399).

In this context, the growing interest of the international EE guidelines in establishing a link between EE and workers, omitting the overexploitation of labour and nature, expanded the instrumental dimensions of EE and strengthened the modus operandi of neoliberal environmental policies. In the developmental period, the United Nations Environment Programme workshop for the industry and environment in Europe, together with the International Labour Organization, organized awareness programmes for businessmen, managers and union leaders, while the EE guidelines highlighted the importance of this type of activity. The required awareness of workers, in turn, reinforced the blaming of the individual and minimized the impact of capitalist relations, given that the development of productive forces based on capitalism is not the responsibility of workers subjected to degrading conditions in exchange for low wages that perpetuate socio-environmental injustices.

In the developmental period, the environmental debate increasingly crossed the frontiers of environmentalists and gained paramount relevance for companies and large transnational corporations. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the decay of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics contributed to consolidate the neoliberal ideology, as this discourse associated socialism with the state and, thus, weakened the advocates for democratization and social control of the state. In the 1980s, with the neoliberal advance, and especially in the following decade, environmental principles constituted a source of tensions between institutionalization, strategies for commercial market liberalization and the parallel struggles for democratization and social justice (Porto-Gonçalves, 2017). Inserted in the process of global political and economic restructuring, the international EE guidelines expressed conceptual principles as a preamble to these disputes.

The guidelines also defined EE ‘as an excellent basis on which to develop a new way of living in harmony with the environment, a new lifestyle’ (UNESCO, 1987a, p. 12). The GTC’s intercollective circulations among the values education theorists were methodologically pertinent because their theorizations sought to understand the relationships between the development of values and human behaviour. The GTC was responsible for legitimizing the acquisition of environmental values and the development of attitudes, via behavioural changes, as structuring principles of the ideas that constituted the GTC’s esoteric circle. The emphasis on the need for a functional EE diverted the course of contraversions, oriented the creation of individual-centred methodological proposals, and determined a single path for socio-environmental development.

The Reformist Period

After the dissemination of UNESCO’s strategy for EE in the 1990s during the Moscow Congress (UNESCO, 1987b), the establishment of the idea of sustainable development as an active link within the GTC, from which the political functions of the EE are structured.

The environmental regulatory framework in the reformist period was structured at the Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992. The growing interest in reinforcing the need for intellectual and financial cooperation for countries with greater economic and educational difficulties joined the stylistic principles covering all the periods under analysis. In this regard, the guidelines of that event were characterized by their emphasis on organizational structures, referring to the ways in which countries should favour the implementation of an ‘environment and development education’ based on the establishment of a cooperative system.

Actively present in the GTC, the discourse of cooperative intervention in favour of sustainable development was legitimized worldwide after the name ‘environmental education’ was replaced, as a specific point of action, with the expression ‘environment and development education’. The new discursive approach with an emphasis on the dual character of the educational processes for environmental awareness and economic development, together with the strengthening of multilateral cooperation/intervention structures in neoliberal practices, instrumentalized the existing link of the EE guidelines with market forces, reinforcing then the required interposition of the private sector.

Connected to the slogan of sustainability, the linking of education to the propositions of sustainable development culminated in the replacement of EE with the discourse of education for environmental purposes in the early 1990s, further highlighting its instrumental character within the framework of environmental policy and management (González-Gaudiano & Ortega, 2009).

The apex of the ESD discourse was established in 2004 with the establishment of the United Nations Decade of ESD. The propositional principles of the ESD programme are linked to the same conceptual structures as in previous periods and reproduce in their content the characteristic methodological propositions of the GTS: interdisciplinary and holistic practices, focus on acquiring values, development of the ability to find solutions to problems, acquiring confidence in the face of dilemmas and challenges in relation to sustainable development; recurrence to the multiplicity of methods, applicability closely related to local life, addressing both local and global problems; and encouraging the participatory decision-making process (UNESCO, p. 16).

The ESD discourse seeks to project itself from the institutional framework built by the EA, supposedly expanding its scope (UNESCO, 2005, p. 18). However, when considering the discursive plurality built in its trajectory, it is noted that the EE–ESD dispute in the last decade is characterized by the development of distinct political and pedagogical projects (González-Gaudiano & Puente-Quintanilla, 2010). ESD presents itself as an extension of a project founded in the GTS, whose foundations for reducing conflicts between the natural resource base and economic development advocate EE as a tool for global awareness through the transfer of knowledge and values, via teaching methods that seek practical application to solve problems, develop skills and encourage participation.

At the same time, other stylistic principles of EE coexist, in addition to the conservation and administration of resources, in different spaces, defined based on other ideological positions, emerging from their political and social contexts. From a counter-hegemonic perspective, it is understood that the external intervention of international organizations in the systematization and financing of measures to achieve certain objectives, such as those articulated in the ESD, implies the submission of educational systems to the needs of the market, which produces a relationship of dependence in which the weaker side is almost never able to see its own demands at the centre of negotiations. The consequence of this is the institutionalization of educational practice in favour of the formation of conditions that allow the maintenance of the exploitation of human work and nature.

Conceptual terms such as flexibility, quality and integration originated from the capitalist core that was committed, in turn, to maintaining private control of the new scientific and technological basis, founded on the productive mechanisms of microelectronics, microbiology and genetic engineering. In this context, the new requirements linked to human capital resulted from the expansion of the intellectual capacity of production, which, in search of leaps in productivity and competitiveness, profoundly changed labour relations through productive decentralization and increased production of exports in periphery countries. For this reason, educational formulations were subordinated to the logic of the market, of capital and, therefore, to the private logic of exclusion, becoming a mechanism for the expansion of excluding processes (Frigotto, 2010).